Review: Searching for Meaning in the Faces of L.A. Noire

We are built to look for faces. When we see a face, it activates a particular part of our brain, one that some scientists say evolved specifically for the purpose of recognizing, processing and storing face data in our cerebral Rolodex. We’re so good at finding faces that we can find them anywhere, even where they’re not: the man in the moon, Jesus on a slice of toast. All we need is two dots and a straight line in the proper orientation, and our brain sees a human being staring back at us.

Videogames have long benefited from the brain’s fervent, automatic search for faces, especially when two dots and a straight line was practically all technology could manage to display. Even early games could get us attached to their characters thanks to our natural tendency to ascribe human characteristics to anything that even barely resembled one.

With its latest game L.A. Noire, Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games has taken a significant step further, using pinpoint-precise motion-capture technology to record the faces of actors as they recite their lines. When I look at the man in the moon, I see a face; when I look at L.A. Noire‘s characters, I see people.

L.A. Noire, to be released Tuesday for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (reviewed), is a glimpse at the future of high-end videogames, the sort of hyperrealism we can expect from improving graphics technology and increasingly sophisticated storytelling.

The game mechanics aren’t nearly as sophisticated as they could be: As an LAPD detective in the late 1940s, you collect evidence and interrogate witnesses to build a case, gameplay that is derivative of (and, I would argue, done better in) games with cartoon graphics and melodramatic stories like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. L.A. Noire‘s puzzle-solving is subservient to its narrative, but the simple allure of playing a part in the game’s gripping story was such that nothing could tear me away from it.

Los Angeles in the late 1940s was also poised at the edge of technological revolution: A city, as the game’s opening scene states, built not around man but around the automobile. It was about to explode in the post-war boom into the model city of modern America, with wide-open freeways replacing jam-packed subway trains and Hollywood nudging out Broadway as the epicenter of popular culture.

In its formative years, booming L.A. presented a power vacuum just waiting to be filled by crooked politicians and unscrupulous businessmen. Just the sort of place that needs a good cop.

In this case, it’s Cole Phelps, decorated World War II veteran and rookie detective. Phelps is played by you. In another sense he is played by Aaron Staton, better known as charming go-getter account man Ken Cosgrove in TV’s Mad Men. (In fact, L.A. Noire is so lousy with Sterling Cooper employees that you half expect to see Don Draper behind the chief of police’s desk. He’s not.)

L.A. Noire is, at its core, an adventure game

L.A. Noire is, at its core, an adventure game, in which you go case by case with Cole, first examining the crime scenes for clues, then following up on leads that take you to new locations around L.A. Noire‘s virtual version of the City of Angels.

L.A. Noire features some action gameplay sequences — you may have to chase down a suspect or go on a shooting spree when things turn bad — but these are ancillary to the experience. In fact, if you fail to complete them on your first couple of tries you can skip them outright. Taken alone, there is nothing especially impressive or unique about these sequences; they are simply there so as to accentuate the rising and falling tension of the stories.

The real meat of the gameplay is the investigation and interrogation. Combing a crime scene for clues is not a difficult thing for naturally OCD gamers such as myself; all it takes is to cover every square inch of the territory available to you (a roped-off area of a public park; a suspect’s filthy apartment). Just rub Cole up against every surface and press the X button whenever the controller helpfully vibrates and you’ll eventually have an evidence notebook full of clues.

As you might expect from the people that brought you Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar pulls no punches in L.A. Noire. Investigating a crime scene can be a shocking time, as you look for ligature marks on a woman’s nude corpse or peer into the glassy eyes of an overdosed heroin junkie. (See the gallery above for some examples of the game’s imagery.)

It’s the interrogation that’s the tricky part. Rockstar clearly has greater ambitions for the face-capturing technology that makes L.A. Noire‘s characters so vivid. They aren’t intended to be just window dressing — you’re supposed to be able to look at the faces of persons of interest and figure out whether they’re lying to you. If they stare you right in the face as they give their responses, that’s a sign they’re being straight with you. If they shift nervously or glance around the room, there might be something they’re hiding. Guess correctly whether they’re telling the truth, hiding something or outright lying (which you must prove by presenting a piece of evidence), and you’ll get more information out of them, maybe leading to a new location or clue. Guess wrong and you could end up missing a vital piece of information.

What makes this process often baffling and occasionally frustrating is that many times there is no definitive way to determine the right answer. To give one example: I was interrogating a teenager whose mother had just died. I asked her if she knew anything about her mother’s jewelry and she said she “didn’t pay much attention” to it. She glanced slightly to her left, a nervous expression on her face. A 15-year-old girl doesn’t know about her mother’s jewelry? Baloney, I thought. I pressed “Doubt.”

Right? Wrong: She clammed up when Phelps pressed her. As it turns out, the correct answer was “Truth,” which then caused her to reveal more information about the jewelry. So she was hiding something, but my correct read on the scene wasn’t interpreted by the game as the right answer.

There are multiple ways around this. If you flub an investigation, you can quit the game and reload your last save point (the game saves automatically at infrequent intervals). You can use “intuition points,” a finite resource that you collect as you go through the game and that work like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire‘s lifelines: You can eliminate one wrong answer or see a poll conducted of the game’s online community, a feature I did not get to test with my pre-release copy of the game.

Or, as I often did, you can just soldier on — you can complete all of L.A. Noire even if you screw up each and every question, although you’ll end up with low ratings on your cases, which can be replayed from a separate menu. Rockstar’s point here is likely that there is no perfectly logical step-by-step method for solving crimes, that big breakthroughs on cases come when sharp detectives ask the right questions based on gut feelings. But if so, there’s a fundamental disconnect between this attitude and the game’s reward system, which punishes you with a big fat X on your notebook and a lowered rating if you ask the “wrong” question.

If I found having to grapple with unsolvable problems particularly annoying it was only because I was so in thrall to L.A. Noire. It was fascinating to watch these tangibly human computer characters talk and twitch and grimace so realistically, their faces so totally matched to the lines of dialog. I was proud to serve under the glorious hellfire-and-brimstone sermonizing of the very devout, very Irish police captain played by Andrew Connolly. As the story deepened and a grand conspiracy began to show itself at the fringes of the various cases Phelps was solving, it stayed true to itself, raising the stakes without becoming ridiculous or implausible.

There’s also something to be said for the vast scale of L.A. Noire‘s populace; every minor character except for the random people on the sidewalk is played by a different actor, and even the people on the sidewalk come in 40 different flavors. Throughout the game’s 20 hours, it never gets old to seek out and talk to as many new people as you can, just to experience that interaction.

L.A. Noire is a game you simply must play if you are interested in the development of storytelling in videogames.

Much like Sony’s Heavy Rain, L.A. Noire is a game you simply must play if you are interested in the development of storytelling in videogames. Also like Heavy Rain, the gameplay occasionally struggles to walk the tightrope between being robust enough to hold up the story but easy enough that the player doesn’t give up halfway through.

In this respect, L.A. Noire is very good but not quite right. What frustrated me the most about flubbing questions wasn’t the demerit on my record but the furious expression on the face of my superior officer as he chewed me out, or the dejected look of an innocent man being sent to jail. As far as I was concerned, these were people.

WIRED Brilliant facial animations, vivid characters, gripping story.

TIRED Finding clues is too easy; interrogating people is too reliant on guesswork.